The Spirit — working outside in

I left with the sense that Miller, in his eagerness, took elements of all his favorite movies without regard for continuity and relation, and blended them like a child who thinks a milkshake made of Phish Food, gummy worms, pixie sticks, and Pop Tarts is a good idea. The end result is an overwhelming sludge with underwhelming appeal.

—Lilly Lampe, Venus Zine

In the end, what The Spirit looks like is student work. A lot of times people think that student work looks bad—fuzzy and clumsy and oddly proportioned. To an extent that's true. But from my experience, what characterizes student work is that it's created 'outside in.' That is, students focus almost exclusively on the tropes of authority. So a typical student Photoshop rendering is shiny and slick (always with lots of airbrush rendering and lens flares), but stiff, with no underlying structure. Or a video project has an elaborate title, lots of 35mm rack focuses, excrutiatingly planned-out three point lighting and an extras DVD with outtakes and special effects breakdowns, but again, no underlying structure. Or a student interior design has lots of expensive tile, complex accent walls, painstakingly chosen lighting and hardware schemes, but no underlying structure. Or student writing has lots of big words ('ramification,' anyone?) but no ideas and no structure. That's exactly what The Spirit is like. It's full of in-jokes, 'moments,' cameos, interesting production design and cinematography and plenty of fodder for the DVD commentary. It's all flash and Easter eggs. But it lacks a skeleton to hold it together resulting in a stiff project.

Another student affectation is to emulate a favorite scene thinking that the scene in itself is interesting. So the film spends all of its time aiming toward the scene without the emotional setup that made the original scene so compelling in the first place. That's working outside in—focusing on the things that leap off the screen and forgetting about the rest.